With the Internet coming into widespread use today, some television stations deliver part of their TV programs on a streaming basis over the Internet in addition to their traditional broadcasts using terrestrial or satellite links.
Besides the TV stations, some content providers deliver their own contents (audio and visual) on the Internet in streaming fashion.
Where the content providers deliver streams of content data over the Internet, they are required to set up their own equipment manned by competent personnel for data format conversion. More specifically, AV (audio and visual) data picked up illustratively by on-site video cameras and AV data retrieved from such recording media as video tapes must be converted by suitable equipment into content stream data in a format ready for delivery over the Internet. Such stream data delivery formats have turned out to be a costly, labor-intensive affair.